Aaron Dembski-Bowden: The First Heretic

Three years. Three long, long years of fighting in the darkness, praying for this moment to come. All doubt, all concern, all suspicion of the Ultramarines’ summons was erased in a dual beat of his twin hearts.

The figure stopped walking. Argel Tal knew this from the cessation of footsteps on blackened earth.

Only then did he speak. A single word: a name used only rarely beyond the warrior-sons who carried Lorgar’s blood in their veins, as they conquered an ignorant galaxy by crozius and bolter.

‘Aurelian,’ the captain said, the word drowning in so many similar whispers.

Argel Tal raised his eyes at last, to see the son of a living god standing in the heart of a necropolis.

THREE

Blood Demands Blood

Sigillite

The Master of Mankind

The Seventeenth Primarch was known to the emergent Imperium by many names. The worlds left in his Legion’s triumphant wake knew him as the Anointed, the Seventeenth Son, or more elegantly, the Bearer of the Word.

To his primarch brothers he was simply Lorgar, the name given to him on his home world of Colchis during the years of turmoil before the Emperor’s arrival.

Yet as with many primarchs, he also bore an informal title – a term of respect often used by the eighteen Legions. Where Fulgrim of the III Legion was known respectfully as the Phoenician, and Ferrus Manus of the X Legion carried the Gorgon as his title, the lord of the XVII Legion was the Urizen – a name pulled from the half-forgotten writings of ancient Terran myth.

None of the one hundred thousand warriors gathered spoke those names now. As the Word Bearers Legion stood at its full, unbelievable strength in perfectly ordered ranks, every one of his sons chanted his true name in sibilant whispers, as if the syllables were an invocation.

Aurelian, they breathed in unison. Lorgar Aurelian, Lorgar the Golden One. Thus was the father known to his chosen children.

The Seventeenth Primarch turned his gaze to the ocean of grey-armoured warriors bred to do his bidding. He seemed to pause, just for a moment, at the immensity of what he was seeing. Those closest to him saw the fires of thought light up his eyes.

‘My sons,’ he said, colouring the words with a smile tainted by sorrow. ‘It lifts my heart to see you all.’

To stare at one of the God-Emperor’s sons was to drink in a vision of avataric perfection. Human senses, even the laboratory-forged perceptions of an Astartes warrior, struggled to process what they were seeing. When Argel Tal first stood before Lorgar as a boy still shy of his eleventh birthday, he had suffered nightmares of confusion and pain for a month.

The Legion’s Apothecaries who watched over the infant recruits were prepared for this. Turyon, the Apothecary who oversaw Argel Tal’s implantation surgeries during his pubescent years, had explained the phenomena to him in one of the tiny isolation cells granted to all Legion acolytes during their training.

‘The nightmares are natural, and will fade in time. Your mind must come to terms with what you have seen.’

‘I am not sure what I saw,’ the boy admitted.

‘You saw the son of a god. Mortal minds and eyes were never meant to witness such things. It will take time to adjust.’

‘It hurts when I close my eyes. It hurts to remember him.’

‘It will not hurt forever.’

‘I want to serve him,’ the eleven-year-old boy had promised, still trembling from the night’s visions. ‘I will serve him, I swear.’

Turyon had nodded, going on to speak of the many lethal trials ahead before he could wear the mantle of an Astartes. Argel Tal had listened to none of it – at least, not then, not that morning with the weak Colchisian sun bringing dawn to his single-windowed cell.

He still thought of Turyon. The Apothecary had died forty years before, and Argel Tal kept a memento of the battle. Even now, he could never hold the curved, broken alien blade without remembering Turyon’s slashed throat.

In truth, that was why he kept it. Remembrance. A morbid habit, perhaps, and one the Chaplains had often chastised him for. It was the mark of an unhealthy mind to gather the weapons that slew one’s brothers.

Argel Tal raised his eyes.

‘Blood demands blood,’ Lorgar said to the warriors gathered in Monarchia’s cratered grave. ‘Blood demands blood.’

As always when in his father’s presence, Argel Tal rationed his gaze to focus upon individual details, rather than his gene-father’s full manifestation.

Lorgar’s eyes, the snowy grey of Colchis’s winter skies, were ringed by kohl, setting them even brighter against the primarch’s skin – skin that seemed golden to unvisored eyes.

Argel Tal’s helm’s eye lenses filtered everything to a world of dark-washed tactical readouts, but it stole none of the detail. He could make out the thousands of individual Colchisian glyphs gold-inked onto the primarch’s white flesh. It was said the tattoos of cuneiform scripture covered most of Lorgar’s body. Certainly, they trailed down his face in tight, perfect lines, from his shaved head to his jawline, each sentence a prayer of devotion, a prophetic hope for the future, or an invocation of strength from a higher power.

Where Lorgar’s regalia hid his flesh, the writing continued over the golden plates of armour, acid-etched into the shining surfaces. Yet for all his majesty, the Seventeenth Primarch did not display his grandeur by ceremonial wargear. His armour may have been gold, but it was no more ornate than the Mark III plate worn by his captains. The oath papers and scrolls of scripture pinned to his breastplate and pauldrons told not of the primarch’s own glory, but his vows to his father, and his devotion to serve the people of the Imperium.

‘And so we come to this,’ the primarch said, his voice never rising far above a whisper, because it never needed to. It reached the ears of his closest sons, and translated smoothly across the vox for the rear ranks.

‘And so we come to this, yet still they make us wait for the answers we deserve.’

Human linguistics couldn’t convey the fierce, soulful confidence Lorgar exuded. His slender lips were curled into the crooked half-smile of an impassioned poet, despite standing in the grave of his greatest achievement. In his gauntleted hands, clutched in gold fists that seemed reluctant to raise the weapon, was a crozius the height of an Astartes warrior.

Illuminarum was the primarch’s one concession to grandeur. The weapon’s haft was the cream of ivory, reinforced by a grip of black iron. Its head was an orb of adamantium, stained black through a forgemaster’s touch and decorated with silver-leafed runes. Evenly-spaced spikes the length of human forearms projected from its outer edges, lending the mace a brutish air almost at odds with the philosophical seeker who carried it across the stars.

Despite the immense craftsmanship in its forging, Lorgar’s crozius was ostentation utterly without beauty. Entire worlds had been put to the flame by its bearer, while every Chaplain of the Word Bearers Legion wielded its lesser reflection.

None of Lorgar’s sons, even those who had spent years from his side, were blind to their father’s unease. The primarch cast glances back at the grounded Ultramarines Thunderhawks, waiting for any signs of emergence. Around his poet’s smile was the faint suggestion of black stubble, something Argel Tal had never seen before on his meticulous primarch.

Lorgar turned away from his sons, now staring down at the impassive gunships. His whisper carried to the entire Legion.

‘Guilliman, brother of my blood, if not my heart. Come to me and answer for your madness.’